It is your fundamental responsibility to live this process itself and not to spend all your time proselytizing with your family and all the rest of the world. So saying all, every relationship. So-called is simply this ritual. It’s an obstruction to consciousness. It’s not a relationship at all. And the whole matter of understanding and inquiry is not really one in which you discover relationship unobstructed. It’s one in which you are continually discovering the avoidance of relationship. Otherwise, the form of inquiry would be different. We don’t discover relationship in life to be the case. Fundamentally, we don’t live it straight, unobstructed, pure, direct. What we see as the world is a design that is itself apparently made up of all kinds of mutualities, dependencies, mutual processes in which nothing is something in itself. Everything is part of a process. That’s apparently what the design of the world is. If we view it, observe it. On the other hand, if we observe our involvement in that world, in that design, we don’t discover relationship. In fact, we discover the avoidance of relationship and the ultimate events of understanding are not discoveries of relationship with this one and that one and every other one. They’re the realization of the absolute unqualified reality in which there are no relationships. No me, no you no any of that. That is the ultimate event of understanding. And in fact, this structure of relationships, of mutualities, of dependencies is great process in which nothing is something in itself, but everything is part of a process with everything else. That world that we observe is not true. It’s not real, it is not.
So the world is not really a vast complex of relationships. The world is the absolute unqualified reality, the Divine without a single speck of otherness within it. And that’s what I mean when I say the devotee or the man of understanding is one in whom the world with a small ‘w’ is seen as a world with a capital ‘W’. The world is seen to be not other than the very truth. The illusion that there are relationships, in other words is undone in the event of radical intuition. The world is seen through. Up until that time we have thought that the world was relationships of all kinds. And it was just that we were not managing them well right now, or they weren’t working out quite well or we just weren’t being loving enough and all that sort of stuff. So we try all these strategies to become more and more relational and a lot of what is done in the confrontations in study groups are attempts to establish relationship again and again and again to break down these obstructions and get down to relationship. But it never happens. (laughter)
There are some modifications in the behavior of people from time to time, and perhaps we are able to become more efficient in what our daily lives amount to. But in fact, it never does occur. There is no intimacy. There is no perfect intimacy, perfect loving, perfect relationship. It does not exist. There is no such thing that is the illusion that we conceive of in our observation of the design of the world. That’s the way it looks like it probably is. And so we accept that in principle, but in fact our activity and the activity of all the processes in the appearing world is one of individuation separation. The avoidance of relationship. That’s what we are continually discovering and in the tension between what appears to be the design that we observe and what appears to be the activity of everything that we observe. We ultimately come to this intuition, which is radical understanding or radical intuition in which there is no self, no other and all the rest.
And in that case then there is something like the sense that there are relationships, love and fullness and all the rest. Because we no longer are pursuing relationships from a point of view in ignorance point of view, within a universe of some sort. We have realized ourselves to be that absolute Divine Reality and the world appears within that. The world is already in union from that point of view. And so in the case of the man of understanding, there appears to be that unobstructed capacity, but it’s not based on him having become capable of relationship. It’s based on him having utterly realized the unreality or illusion of relationship in itself. It doesn’t exist in itself. It’s only a design appearing in a reality in which there is no otherness, no twos, no pairs, no unions, no connections. There’s only that one reality and all beings are that when they realize that, then they’re apparently capable of engaging with one another in parent intimacy, love, humor, celebration, all of the rest free of the games that people create in ignorance, we always settling for mediocrity, for mediocre arrangements, finding some sort of peaceful arrangement with people and getting them to still like us and we still like them and get along and all this idiotic crap. It was just a few years in which possibly you may grasp something, which possibly you can realize. Truth, reality,
And the world as it is the daily news, the bullshit of life that everybody lives with one another in these associations prevents that conscious realization and constantly enforces the illusion that there are intimacies and mutualities and connections and conversations and understandings of one another and all that. It’s just a lot of shit. Nothing like that ever happens. It never happens at any hour. Nobody communicates with one another. Nobody loves anybody. Nobody’s straight with anybody else. All there is is the ritual of the avoidance of relationship. That’s all there is. And I don’t mean that just a little bit, I mean that to be an absolute criticism for those who respond to the teaching to deal with, they should observe what it is that they do, what their relationships. So-called amount to, and they will see that they are just ways of obstructing the force of consciousness existence. They are details that involve you, that force your attention into little boxes, little functional dimensions of your own thinking and feeling and all the rest. And that’s all that life amounts to in general for people who don’t penetrate it, they don’t comprehend anything about it. They don’t pass into a totally new kind of conscious life. They settle for these piddling little relationships, so-called with individuals in which they get to enact the same old idiocy that has kept human beings asleep since the beginning.